The invention relates to a method for selection of an experimental design. Design of Experiments (DOE) is a statistical based approach for efficient cause and effect analysis of a system. The process of designed experimentation entails sampling an n-dimensional design or process operating space. By perturbing the inputs (or X""s) in an orderly fashion, insight into the effect on the outputs (or Y""s) may be gained.
There exists a number of various families of experimental designs such as Box-Behnken, Plackett-Burman, Central Composite (face-centered or not), Small Central Composite (face-centered or not), Taguchi and Orthogonal designs, Optimal designs (with different optimality criteria), Mixture, Factorial and Fractional Factorial, and Hybrid. Depending upon the objective of the given experiment, the selection of an appropriate DOE will prove to be critical in order to obtain the desired results from the experiment. If the wrong DOE is selected, this can lead to inaccurate results. The DOE tool is being used increasingly by users with little or no experience in selecting an appropriate DOE. Accordingly, a method of selecting an appropriate DOE would be beneficial to such users.
An exemplary embodiment of the invention is directed to a method for assisting a user in selecting a design of experiment. The method includes obtaining a plurality of attributes associated with a plurality of experimental designs. A series of questions are presented to the user directed to objectives of the design of experiment. The user responds to the questions and one or more user-selected attributes are determined in response to the user""s answers to the questions. The process selects or de-selects one or more of the experimental designs in response to the user-selected attributes and notifies the user of the selected experimental designs.